There has been no rapper who has taken it upon themselves to narrate their version of the #BlackLivesMatter movement with such sonic substance and clarity than Kendrick Lamar. The dichotomous relationship between blacks and whites in America seems to gain more saliency every time we turn on CNN. And the relationship between blacks and whites has never been rhymed with more elegance than on a “sleeper track” from Kendrick’s latest critically subversive and politically acclaimed album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Appropriately titled, “Complexion”, K dot rhymes through insurgent tones pertaining to a multitude of experiences brought on by skin color. He speaks on the seemingly innate yet trivial complexities of black self-hate that is created by simple differences in melatonin levels. The hook clearly proclaims the message of the track: Complexion means nothing. Unfortunately Kendrick is grappling with the utopian ideal of living in a post-racial society while still living in one that is institutionally segregated along racial lines. Kendrick is right – completion doesn’t mean a thing. But unfortunately his hook would be more accurate if it said, complexion shouldn’t mean a thing.

Listen closely to the first 16 bars of the track as Kendrick puts himself in the historic shoes of a slave who is lusting after a lighter-skinned “house servant”. The line, “Sneakin’ through the back window, I’m a good field nigga. I made a flower for you outta cotton just to chill wit ya,” is so metaphorically potent that upon each listen you can feel another layer of its meaning. On the surface it describes the obstacles that impede society’s unity and the division that is founded on race. On a deeper level, those very lines can be used to sum up the entire TPAB album. The butterflies in this case are rappers, or on a grander level, the exploitation of black culture and the symbolism can be meant to represent the route that black culture had, and has, to take just to get “a seat at the table” – through the back window. The flower out of cotton made just to chill is the packaging of our culture’s hard work and determinism. Yes. Shit gets deep.

“Brown skinned but your blue eyes tell me your mama can’t run” is another example of the historical markings that slavery has left on our society. The controversial nature of skin color is fervently challenged in this telling track off of TPAB. There are rappers who make catchy songs that sonically sound great but have little social relevance and there are rappers who purposely and unknowingly are pressed into appropriating our culture, and then there are rappers who maintain a vision of the roots of hip hop and use their words to tell a story. A story about what growing up black feels like. The realest rappers are not the ones who claim to slang the most dope, drop the most bodies or bag the most shorties; the realest rappers are those who still feel that this tool of music can be used as a weapon for both economic stability and social change. A song like “Complexion” reveals why Kendrick is one of the realest rappers out.

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I want to start off by sharing a story. Picture me walking into a 300 level university course. I would walk in late on a routine basis; pants sagging, headphones still in blasting music just loud enough to cause a minor distraction, hat on, staring directly into the teacher’s eyes. It was as if I was daring my professor to address my demeanor. But something happened that day, in fact, it had been happening for a while now. In fact, it had been happening ever since I stepped into university.

You see, my ‘performance’ was merely a repetition of my tried and tested high school routine; a routine that I would use to illicit some type of attention from the authority in the classroom. And at that time, in the space of schooling, any type of attention was better than no attention, or validation, at all. So naturally, the attitudes I embodied and negotiated usually came from a place that would garner me negative attention. However, this no longer occurred in university. Thus, began my journey into exploring how urban Black males experience schooling practices with an explicit interest on how that experience is different in the high school setting compared to the university one.

Growing up in a so-called ‘at-risk’ community, I was heavily invested in hip-hop culture. I would even venture to say that I learned more from Nas and TLC than I did from my textbooks. The issue I experienced, like many other urban Black males, was that the hip-hop cultural aesthetics and vernacular I learned from and ultimately appreciated were the furthest thing from being valued in the traditional school space. As a result, the space of school and the space of my community grew to the point where they became two mutually exclusive environments. Subsequently, my identity was also in constant negotiation.

Fortunately, Black masculinity has also survived in the space of negotiation. In today’s terms, that negotiation translates to an ability to be adaptable. This ability to become adaptable through identity politics converges on an understanding of how aesthetics, vernacular, and space all either resist or reciprocate Power. Ultimately, an examination of how urban Black males, especially ones espoused by a hip-hop culture, work with these interrelated networks can be used to comprehend how urban Black males experience school while simultaneously pinpointing why schooling pushed some intelligent urban Black youth out of education while retaining certain others.

To close, one needs to look no further than the 90’s hit TV show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Two of the main characters, Will Smith and Carlton Banks, represent the essentialist discourse around Black masculinity. On one hand you have Will, the nonchalant, easy-going, suave, Black male who tries to “slide through” school by maintaining a quasi hyper-masculinity. On the other hand, there’s Carlton Banks, the young, intelligent, “square” Black male who places success above all else. Some may even say that Carlton represents that Black male who has been “white washed”. But maintaining and perpetuating these sole tropes of Black masculinity is troubling. It speaks to the problem of discourse pertaining to urban Black males that either pathologizes them or attacks hegemony. If this is the only dichotomy that exists, Black males will continue to find themselves in a lose-lose situation.

This speaks to the need to challenge our current understandings of Black masculinity and how school operates as a cleanser of sorts; always trying to sanction the attitudes, behaviors, and skill-sets of particular bodies. I have no problem with the ideal of a ‘universal student’, but whose model of ‘universality’ are we following? And who has to make the biggest alterations to their being when we decide upon this? Both school and student must work to challenge the common stereotypes that are placed on Black males by providing opportunities for them to be seen for their complexity as people. I can be both Will Smith and Carlton Banks and that does not sacrifice any type of ‘authenticity’ I am aiming to achieve. Our students can wear Jordans and sag their jeans and even come to class late, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that they understand the importance of education. Our Black males are not lazy, underachievers, or at-risk. It is the box placed upon them that demarcates them as such and subsequently makes them feel like that. When we analyze the complexity in which urban Black males experience school settings and discuss the ways that some have become successful at doing so without placing polarizing tropes of identity on them, maybe then we can say, “we’ve made it”.

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Clearly, there are more questions about situated and contextual knowledge than answers. The hustler playing three-card monte on 6^th Ave. may not have the same credentials, or letters behind his name as I do, but in that situation he certainly was my intellectual equal. This leads us to the question of validated knowledge. What knowledge becomes validated through discourse and what knowledge finds itself slotted way down the intellectual pole of hierarchy?

I don’t want to assume anything about my man’s life situation and how he ended up hustling tourists on a random corner of downtown Manhattan. But because I have had conversations with many students who have Masters and Doctorates, I can assume that, given the “right” opportunities, this dude could have easily taken a seat beside me in any course on Anti-Racism Education and spoken a narrative that was true, poignant, and insightful. Perhaps he would rather be out there “with the people” and making his ends meet by tricking people into a false sense of confidence. But I would wager this: this dude was probably never afforded the opportunity to see the path of higher education as an option.

These hustlers are clearly successful in their vein of employment. Like drug dealers and other criminal forms of occupation, I am agitated with questions regarding why some would choose this over conventional forms of making an honest living. And trust me, the aspect of illicit activity for a means of a living hits home closer than you think (Perhaps…no, never a blog, you’ll have to wait for the book!). The rationale for one to choose this life path over more “safer” options perplexes me. Because I don’t have the answer, despite reading numerous insights on criminology, I am left standing at a corner, still swayed into thinking that I am smarter than this dude facilitating a card game. I guess the only question that we can really answer in education is: How do we get to these brilliant men before they choose a life of the street?

One solution is for education to provide opportunities that validate differentiated knowledges. Hustlers are no dummies, so they couldn’t have been dummies in school. However, they were probably meant to feel that their brand of intellect, or street smarts, would never be valued in the space of a school.

So they left.

What if we were to somehow validate these forms of non-conventional knowledge so that these young men could see themselves in a promising light? Discourse makes it seem as though these black men abandon school. But by a simple observation of the hustler’s intellectual competence, it clearly seems that school, in some form or fashion, abandoned him. His fuck it moment didn’t come from him thinking that he wasn’t smart enough to “do school”. His moment of departure came from school’s insistence that he didn’t fit in with the program. It always takes two to tango.

But in this dance of inequity and injustice, the impetus is on education to take the lead, not the student. We can no longer afford to lose our money to three-card monte pros simply because school crabbed out on them long time ago…

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